If you were an early Internet kid you'll recall a little app called WinAmp that was, in short, the best MP3 player ever made ever. The little program looked like skeuomorphic stereo receiver with a full range of equalizer sliders and included an important MP3 that explained WinAmp's primary mission: whipping the llama's ass.

A programmer named Jordan Eldredge has created an homage to WinAmp in JavaScript. The widget allows you to create a standalone music player on any web page and it can be styled with themes straight out of WinAmp history. You can try it out here and download the code here.

"The original inspiration was a realization that Winamp skins were implemented in a very similar way to CSS sprites," said Eldredge. "I spent many hours as a teenager playing with Winamp skins. In fact, it was the first constructive creative work I did on a computer."

The emulator uses the Web Audio API to simulate almost everything WinAmp could do in its original incarnation.

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Rejoice, llama-whipping fans, a new version of Winamp is set to be released in 2019, according to a Monday report by TechCrunch. Alexandre Saboundjian, the CEO of Radionomy, said that the upgrade would bring a "complete listening experience."

[...] The Belgian company that bought Winamp from AOL in January 2014 hasn't really done much with it since buying the remnants of the property just months after AOL finally pulled the plug.

The rest of us had DOS apps that could do most of its features for a number of years.

As to music: Go look up the chiptunes archives on textfiles.com and scene.org. Like the music industry in general there was stinkers, ripoffs, and original amazing works. You just have to go and find them.

Personally I didn't get into winamp when it came out, however XMMS turned into my goto music player well into the mid '00s. The web radio support in it was good enough for me to spend a couple years getting introduced to british music via Virgin Radio's UK streams, including Estelle when she was still up and coming, before being reintroduced to her when Steven Universe came out :)

Re:WinAmp for n00bs was paradigm changing...(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday February 12 2018, @11:28AM

The rest of us had DOS apps that could do most of its features for a number of years.

Really? I got WinAMP back in 1997, which came on a CD full of MP3 tools that came on a magazine cover talking about the new MP3 phenomenon. The same CD also came with tools for ripping CDs and other players, including a couple of DOS ones. Even with the DOS players, my brand-new 133MHz Pentium computer was using around 70% of its CPU playing a single MP3. Anything more than a couple of years older would have needed hardware acceleration to be able to play them back. The hard disk I had at the time was a huge 1GB. That didn't give much space for music, even at 128Kb/s (one album was over 5% of my total disk space). It wasn't until I got a 4.3GB disk a few years later that ripping music seemed like it might be a good idea and not until I got a 20GB disk in 2001 that ripping all of my music seemed plausible.

We had module players for a few years before then, but WinAMP came at about the time that MP3 ripping and playback became feasible on home computers.

I can't speak to how it ran on your PC (it ran just fine on mine, FWIW), but "gaudy" it definitely was not. Not out of the box, at any rate. You had plenty of gaudy options to choose from in the many, many skins available, but those were 100% optional. The basic WinAMP UI was pretty vanilla.

Maybe you're thinking of one of the many other audio players that were around at the time. There were plenty of options available and many tended toward gaudy in order to distinguish themselves.

Might be talking past each other. WinAmp 1 and 2 used basically the same skin (2 was a shinier version of 1), as seen here [wikimedia.org] but WinAmp 3 threw that out the window with modern [wikimedia.org] version. It was so bad that they sort of did a backport of the skin to 3 (which didn't quite look right due to the GUI changes) and then made version 5 (the best parts of 2 + the best parts of 3) default to the "modern" skin but asked on first run if they wanted the "classic" one instead.

I always thought they went to 5 to signify merging the best(?) bits of 2 and 3, since 3 was utter trash to use and bloated. Personally I reverted to 2.91, I still have it installed although I don't use it now.

Re:Download RealPlayer, go on I dare you(Score: 2) by chromas on Tuesday February 13 2018, @05:29AM

They actually offered up both explanations, but yours was sort of the 'official' one. One cool thing WinAMP does (as does Foobar2000) is read archive files, so when I buttpirate a 'discography' rar, I don't even have to unpack it to load it into the player.

If you want a WinAMP2-alike (with skin support, even), there's XMMS [xmms.org] and several descendants, such as QMMP [ylsoftware.com], Beep Media Player(x) [beep-media-player.org] and Audacious [audacious-media-player.org].

Yeah, I remember Realplayer. What I remember most clearly about Realplayer, was that it was a resource hog. Winamp played music, in the background, while I did whatever it was that I intended to do on the computer. The little jingle about the llama's ass was funny, and it made me like Winamp even more. We need more ass-whipping in the computer world, as well as less resource usage.

I also remember that later versions of Winamp began using more and more resources, with zero improvement in performance. The llama whipping crew lost control of their work, and the corporate world took over. That was the end of Winamp.

I also remember that later versions of Winamp began using more and more resources, with zero improvement in performance. The llama whipping crew lost control of their work, and the corporate world took over. That was the end of Winamp.

IIRC, we had a post on this article [arstechnica.com] which discusses how and why Winamp turned to shit.

I wonder what happened to WASTE? An encrypted, private P2P network. Seemed like a great idea then, and an even better one now. I know AOL pulled it, but it was open source and published online, so i always thought i would get forked and live on.

Yeah, I remember Realplayer. What I remember most clearly about Realplayer, was that it was a resource hog.

What I remember most about RealPlayer was being suckered into trying RealJukebox. First they "upgraded" their products to an early version of spyware (that was easy to disable) which was bad enough, but what swore me off their (whatever the parent company was called) products forever was my first introduction to the pain of proprietary formats and DRM*. My Windows 98 install got hosed at one point and I tediously saved all my various media and other files to external media (I think it was 3.5" floppies back then) using DOS, then reinstalled Windows. I downloaded and installed RealPlayer and RealJukebox again but discovered that none of the hundreds of .mp3's I had ripped from my CD's using RealJukebox would function because the new version had a different security code than the original. Uninstalled both programs and used various substitutes from then on, one of which was WinAmp.*and not having backups!

I might be the only who didn't really like Winamp.... To be fair, the 1990's...

Right now, today, my girlfriend uses Winamp to manage her music collection and music players. She switched from Windows Media Player to itunes when WMP wouldn't work with her ipod without an expensive plugin. She switched from itunes to Winamp when she found out that itunes would not load the music files off an old ipod onto the computer, but Winamp would. This was all years ago but she still uses it because it has worked for everything she needed, and it has followed her from computer to computer several times (each time she asks me why music she downloads doesn't magically show up, and I have to go reconfigure the directories that Winamp is to "watch".)

Re:Download RealPlayer, go on I dare you(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 12 2018, @05:03PM

Real Alternative is what I've been using, if I've needed Real Player compatibility. I wouldn't knowingly install RealPlayer, especially the modern version. Real Player always seemed like a bad implementation of Flash to me. Any place you could have made use of Real Player, a real video without the real media encoding or Flash seemed to be more appropriate.

It really was a great piece of softwareIt really was a great piece of software(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday February 12 2018, @02:43AM
(13 children)

For the time frame of its development it really was an astoundingly good mp3 player. Did everything it needed to do.

Even after later attempts to monetize it, there was not match that could match it.

Everybody started coming out with those full screen music players, as if people had nothing to do on theircomputers except play music. (Unfortunately the linux world has followed suit, and finding a decent music app isa chore.)

Not content to simply play music, they all want to hang in video, streaming, serving, lyrics fetching, cover art, and, wiki articles.There are some true abominations in the world of music applications.

--No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.

Re:It really was a great piece of softwareRe:It really was a great piece of software(Score: 4, Insightful) by buswolley on Monday February 12 2018, @02:52AM
(6 children)

I don't see much today that is better than Winamp. It was responsive. It did its job. It had a sexy look, and if you didn't like it, you could skin it. There were some cool visualizations (remember milkdrop2; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shg4kjdOoYk [youtube.com] ). Then there was shoutcast.

Re:It really was a great piece of softwareRe:It really was a great piece of software(Score: 2) by deimtee on Monday February 12 2018, @10:25AM
(2 children)

Best linux music player I had was one of the earlier versions of Amorok, 2-point-something I think.

Then it upgraded itself to a later version and it started trying to connect to servers and download shit. If you accidentally enabled options like cover download you couldn't turn them off again. The controls went to shit, easy to use sliders became some sort of vague rotary control where you made random circle motions with the mouse hoping you didn't cross one of the other controls while trying to turn the fucking volume up or down. The local database of your music it maintained was dumped in favour of some online bullshit, which meant that searching and listing went from milliseconds to tens of seconds. If the internet was disconnected or blocked it ran so slow you would swear it was sulking.

I have never seen a program more effectively get its balls cut off than what happened to Amorok. You would think that Poettering and the Gnome team collaborated on it.

--If the only proposed solution to a problem is a tax, then it is just an excuse to tax, not a solvable problem.

Re:It really was a great piece of softwareRe:It really was a great piece of software(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @11:41AM
(1 child)

Amarok and it's 1.x the good major version. I stopped using it after the 2.They took away all the good stuff and replaced it with buggy, useless crap. It became total POS.Clementine is a fork of Amarok 1.4

I remember him telling about the machine he had retired as his main box then mounted vertically and used as a media box.(The mounting wasn't especially well done and the machine later took a devastating tumble.A temblor in Tokyo, as I recall.)

So, at the kind of prices and the system load he was working with, yeah, it makes perfect sense.

Re:It really was a great piece of softwareRe:It really was a great piece of software(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 12 2018, @11:43AM
(1 child)

See, I'm a luddite there. I specifically do not want bells and whistles in my mp3 player. If I'm gui-ing it, I want a small gui player that plays my tunes and nothing else. If I'm cli-ing, there's mpg123.

--"Buzzy, you're probably the dumbest person I've ever encountered. Well, there is aristarchus, so make it 2nd dumbest."

Re:It really was a great piece of software(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @08:43PM

I use mpd and mpvc (which does the same thing for mpv) to remotely control my media center box. Press a hotkey, ncmpcpp slides out, plus I have the play/pause, next, previous hotkeys. Another hotkey will show my videos and ask me which screen and audio out to use. It's very convenient for my setup, although I would probably just use moc if I didn't have the media box.

Used WinAmp until it died, switched to Linux for all desktops but still awaiting a player providing that solid and reliable experience. In the meantime, mpd plus Cantata are OK. Must admit that the OSS experience of having your desktop environment go down in flames periodically is getting really old.

Um, when did it die? Sure, it's not under development anymore, but it still plays most music files. I still use it (version 5), there's nothing better. It's a stable, mature piece of software, there are a bunch of skins and plugins available, and, partly thanks to it's age, it uses very little resources. Literally the only problem is it doesn't support Linux.

> Must admit that the OSS experience of having your desktop environment go down in flames periodically is getting really old.

That's... the "Windows experience" :/ And I have regular BSODs to prove it!

I couldn't find a way to load an input plugin for file formats associated with classic video game systems, such as NSF, SPC, and the like. That's most of what I used Winamp for at some stage back when I used it. I know loading x86 code isn't likely to happen, and I had hoped that there might be some API that lets a plugin author compile it to asm.js or WebAssembly or whatever, but issue 92 was closed, and the closest comment to it implied "won't fix" [github.com].

Lets put it on the web! DerhLets put it on the web! Derh(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday February 12 2018, @04:08AM
(2 children)

Big REAPER fan here. I prefer the way it works over Cubase and the price is really good too. Did you know they have a hidden native Linux build (not running under Wine)? I just started running that and it's working. The latency of REAPER under Linux is better than Ardour and it is more reliable too.

Big shoutout for DeadBeeF [sourceforge.net], a lovely open source program that plays music. And pretty much nothing else.

If you don't want or need a multi-media,plays everything ever created and catalogs it, sorts it, make suggestions, skins itself inside out, visualizationizes, and includes not one, but two kitchen sinks while also being (mostly) iTunes compatible, this is what you need.

Re:''plays music. And pretty much nothing else''(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Tuesday February 13 2018, @12:56AM

No, it's DeadBeeF for music and Podcast Addict [uservoice.com] for podcasts. The latter offers a level of setting and customization options that beggars belief. I'd swear that somewhere in it is a setting to arrange podcast episodes by the height and hair color of the announcer.

(The developer even answers emails. Politely.) (Take that TinyTiny RSS)